Alexander Lee’s well-researched, nicely written, pleasantly illustrated book on the Italian Renaissance — especially the Florentine Renaissance — makes a very useful if not very original argument: The glorious products of Italian visual art in the period from 1380 to 1560 were created in a sociopolitical environment of extraordinary moral corruption and often for viciously self-interested and self-serving motives. Rightly taking Florence as the center of the Renaissance, he shows in detail how artistic patronage by families such as the Medici, and by popes and cardinals in Rome who were frequently their relatives, was almost always corrupt in its motives …